Polysilanes and polycarbosilanes are well known in the art and tend to have either an all silicon backbone —(Si—Si)— or a silicon-carbon backbone —(Si—C)—, respectively. Polysilanes are typically formed in a Wurtz coupling process using, as one example, Me2SiCl2, sodium or potassium metal, toluene, and heat. This process is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to implement on a production scale because metals such as sodium and potassium are pyrophoric, difficult to handle, and costly. In addition, this process generates inorganic salts as by-products which need to be disposed of and/or recycled, thereby further increasing production complexities and costs. Since scaling up this process to commercial production scale is not practical, the large scale production of polysilanes tends to be difficult and expensive.
Polycarbosilanes are typically formed using Grignard reactions of chloromethyltrichlorosilanes, ring-opening polymerization reactions of 1,3-disilacyclobutane derivatives, and/or hydrosilylation reactions of vinyl silanes. These reactions tend to be inefficient and expensive and tend to generate unwanted by-products that lower the yield of the polycarbosilanes. In addition, it is both costly and difficult to recycle the by-products and other remnants of these reactions. Accordingly, scaling up these reactions to commercial production scale is also not practical. Just as above, this difficulty in scaling makes the large scale production of polycarbosilanes difficult and expensive. As a result of the aforementioned production difficulties, there remains an opportunity to develop an improved process for forming both polysilanes and polycarbosilanes.